In cheese-producing machines, in particular automatic cheese winding machines, transport systems with circulating transport pallets for conveying cops and tubes have been known for some time. The spinning cops or the empty tubes are releasably secured in a vertical orientation on upstanding pegs on these transport pallets.
As described in German Patent Publication DE 32 35 442 C2, for example, such a transport system can have a connected transport loop, which extends around both the ring spinning machines producing spinning cops and the automatic cheese winding machines processing the spinning cops into large-volume cheeses.
However, such a transport system has the disadvantage that the transport pallets used cannot be optimally matched to the requirements or the conditions of the two textile machines which are a part of the composite machine and are quite different in their structural design. The relatively narrow spindle arrangement of the ring spinning machine, for example, requires transport pallets of a narrow diameter, while in the area of the cheese winding machines transport pallets of a large diameter are more advantageous in the interest of sufficient stability under load.
For this reason transport systems have already been developed in the past to avoid the known disadvantages of the above described installations. For example, a transport installation, which represents the prior art, is described in German Patent Publication DE 39 19 525 A1, wherein a separate transport system for the ring spinning machine and a separate transport system for the automatic cheese winding machine are provided. Separate groups of transport pallets respectively dedicated to the spinning machine transport system or to the winding machine transport system circulate in these separate transport systems. The two transport systems adjoin one another at a common area at which a transfer device is provided to transfer the spinning cops or the empty tubes from the transport pallets of the one transport system to the transport pallets of the other transport system.
Although such transport installations permit the employment of machine-specific transport pallets, the transfer device disposed in the contact area has been problematic in practice in that the transfer devices known so far (e.g., German Patent Publications DE 39 19 525 A1, DE 40 34 824 A1) either operate discontinuously, which has a disadvantageous effect on the throughput volume of the installation, or are relatively expensive in structural design and prone to malfunctions.
For example, German Patent Publication DE 44 38 473 A1 shows a transfer device wherein each one of the numerous gripper elements arranged on a rotating disk is seated vertically displaceable by means of its own push-piston gear. Thus, during operation the individual push-piston gears which actuate the gripper elements are sequentially triggered and lift the spinning cops from the bolt-like tube supports of a first transport system and transfer them to the transport pallets of an intersecting transport device.